Electronic documents such as word processor documents, presentations, spreadsheets, PDF documents, and others are commonly drafted and edited by multiple authors. User collaboration is especially common in a workplace environment. Large, multi-section documents can be created through contributions by multiple team members. This can involve saving the document in a shared folder where it can be accessed and edited by numerous users.
However, in a large document editing context, current document-sharing technologies have several technology-specific shortcomings. Current document-sharing technologies can put a strain on network bandwidth. Each time a user makes a small change to a document, the document must be entirely redistributed to any other user who wishes to perform an edit. This results in a nearly-identical document being replicated across the network to other users, consuming valuable network bandwidth. Where each version of a document is stored, this process can also negatively impact storage capacity. As employee counts, document numbers, and document sizes grow, the impact on enterprise network bandwidth and storage capacity increases. Additionally, remotely working on the document can become untenable based on the large amount of data that the user must download each time the user wants to edit a document.
For large files with many contributors, current document-sharing technologies also impose technical barriers to production. When a user checks out a document for editing, the user must check the document back in before another user can edit the document. This is inefficient when a large number of contributors need to edit different parts of the document. Users can be sitting idly waiting to check out the document for editing, causing an editing user to feel compelled to stop editing prematurely because they know another user is waiting. Or worse, the editing user might forget to check the document back in, needlessly delaying other users from editing other parts of the document.
Based on at least these problems specific to document-sharing and document-management technology, a need exists for systems for improved modular document editing.